The Mother Wound

I thought I had left it all behind, 3000 miles ago, 3 decades ago, 3 dozen workshops ago, 3 thousand hours of meditation ago,

But one five-minute phone call brings it all back,

The mother wound, indefensible, and now it seems, insurmountable.

There’s no protection from this maternal attack, so unpredictable and vicious.

No blind, unquestioning trust for the girl I was, but an ever-vigilant wariness hovering over my head, never knowing when the knife’s keen edge might twist, turn on me and slash deep into the tender moist kernel nestled inside the center-most chamber of my heart.

The pure innocent love of a child turned to mother for validation and adoration, was retuned not with understanding and nurturing but with a platter of conditions and a sauce of poison on the side, all mixed together in an unpalatable tainted stew.

Toxic love on which my life depended, my first sense of self misshapen and twisted, ripped from the life-giving matrix, the once-secure rootlings torn from their rich earthen bed waved about looking for home.

Does she know she set booby-traps in my psyche, waiting to snap their shark-edged steel teeth on an escaping paw whenever I dare move too far toward the edge of my invisible cage, ingeniously constructed to keep me small and unthreatening?

Woven into this mother wound is the secret fear I am wanted dead, that I will be tortured unto death if I ever really make the work that is in me to make.